The Quest for Modern Conservatism

theimaginativeconservative.org/2018/01/robert-nisbet-quest-modern-conservatism-bradley-birzer.html

Bradley J. Birzer January 29, 2018

The job of every conservative is twofold: First, he must fight tirelessly against the centralized,
unitary state; second, he must do everything possible to promote that which makes the free
society not just an ordered one, but a good one…

Prior to the publication of Russell Kirk’s

masterful The Conservative Mind in 1953,
no real conservative movement existed.
Certainly, in the interwar years, there had
been a number of writers who had given
voice to conservative sentiments. Names
such as Willa Cather, Paul Elmer More,
T.S. Eliot, Christopher Dawson, Sigrid
Undset, and Irving Babbitt immediately
spring to mind. Others, such as Albert Jay
Nock, Friedrich Hayek, Walter Lippman,
Rose Wilder Lane, Isabel Patterson, Ray
Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, Dorothy
Thompson, Arthur Bestor, John Chamberlain, and others contributed much as well, though
one might not readily label them conservative. Almost no one used the word conservative,
with only a few important exceptions. “Individualist” and “libertarian” were the words most
often employed to describe those Americans not on the Left.

In 1952 and 1953, however, the entire scene changed with books such as Robert Nisbet’s
Quest for Community, Leo Strauss’s Natural Right and History, Daniel Boorstin’s Genius of
American Politics, and Eric Voegelin’s New Science of Politics, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit
451, Whittaker Chambers’s Witness, C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, Christopher Dawson’s
Understanding Europe, and, most especially, Kirk’s The Conservative Mind.

When Nisbet first published The Quest for Community in 1953, he did not consciously
consider himself a conservative, though he had spent most of his academic career up to
that point writing about the formation of associations and communities as understood by
French conservatives and French and Russian anarchists. Certainly, Nisbet had, like many
not on the Left in the 1930s, found himself deeply disillusioned by the New Deal, at home
and abroad. He had also, importantly, read the works of Hilaire Belloc and Albert Jay Nock,
and, most likely, Irving Babbitt. When pressed, though, Nisbet would, in the 1930s and 40s,
call himself a “political pluralist” or “neoliberal.”

Though nowhere in his own work, private or public, does Nisbet state this blatantly, it
seems most probable that he adopted the term “conservative” almost immediately after
corresponding with Russell Kirk and reading The Conservative Mind. Kirk, himself, read
The Quest for Community while stranded at a derelict train station in Scotland. He was, he
later wrote, at
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 Thornton Junction, a blot on the green face of Fife, while waiting for a train. Thornton
Junction is a series of illimitable railway-platforms and sidings set amid a shamefully
desolated region of derelict farmland and bog, sacrificed to open-cast mining and then left
dead in a contorted rigor mortis: the very earth is not soil, but a black and gritty abomination,
without grass, without houses, without shelter from the wind; and on the wooden platform one
sits for lonely hours, with nothing to eat and nothing to look at, waiting for a dirty train to take
one slowly to a dirty town. Thornton Junction is a microcosm of our insecure and devastated
age, true community sacrificed to alleged “efficiency,” every ethical consideration thrown
aside as an impediment to ‘progress.’

While there, Nisbet’s book came alive, a sacramental talisman and a contrast in beautiful
prose, Kirk believed, to the horrors of modern man’s neglect surrounding him.

Later, when finally having arrived in Edinburgh, Kirk decided that Nisbet was the modern
Tocqueville. Though reluctant to label him a “conservative,” Kirk did know that Nisbet
despised all of the same things he despised: communism, fascism, and leftism. Certainly,
Kirk had found in Nisbet a crucial ally. If Kirk almost single-handedly brought about the
revival of Burke, Nisbet had done the same for Tocqueville. The two pairs—Nisbet and
Tocqueville, Kirk and Burke—were, together, the foundation of all modern conservatism.

From 1953 until his own death in 1994, Kirk never failed to praiseThe Quest for
Community as a seminal work in American thought. Importantly, when any person—
especially those in opposition—wrote about the conservatism of the 1950s, they always
mentioned Kirk and Nisbet as partners. Nisbet thought the “guilt by association” hilarious,
but he also approved of it and, even, took considerable pride in that association. Kirk,
tellingly, devoted much of the second edition of The Conservative Mind analyzing Nisbet,
replacing his work with those in the first edition about Albert Jay Nock and Isabel Paterson.

As noted in previous essays for The Imaginative Conservative, The Quest for Community
has never gone out of print. It has, however, arrived in a variety of editions.

1953: The Quest for Community (Oxford University Press)

1961: as Community and Power (Oxford University Press)

1970: The Quest for Community (Oxford University Press)

1990: The Quest for Community (ICS Press)

2010: The Quest for Community (ISI Books)

In a rather stunning and insightful 1993 autobiographical essay published in The

Intercollegiate Review, Nisbet admitted that he had always been perplexed that the book
did not take off and gain a reputation beyond conservative and sociological circles until
adopted by the New Left in the 1960s. Perhaps, Nisbet mused, the New Left had decided
that conservatives were allies in their all-out war against mainstream liberalism. To his
death, though, Nisbet remained perplexed that he had become a leftist icon in the
turbulence of the late 1960s and early 70s.

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In that same essay, he also revealed the three greatest influences on his own thought as
he wrote the original version of The Quest for Community. First, he cited, not surprisingly, a
love of Roman history, and, in particular, the decline of the republic and the rise of empire.
In those dread years, Nisbet saw how readily the state crushed the intermediary institutions
so vital to the republic, but none more important than family. Second, he found much to
love about medieval associations as presented by Otto Von Gierke, F.W. Maitland, and
Ernest Barker. Third, he admitted, his book was most certainly a reaction to his own
disillusionment with, and then hatred of, the New Deal at home and abroad.

In his own words, reflecting on what he had tried to state in The Quest for Community and
for what The Quest for Community might mean in a post-Cold War era, Nisbet warned that
the conservative might veer, in his frustration with the modern world, toward a radical
individualism or a nationalism. Each, he cited, would result in great evils. A pure
individualism would unwittingly surrender all social authority to the state, thus, ultimately,
destroying any real individuality or personhood. “I am not, I trust, preaching anarchism.”

Equally dangerous, though, were all forms of modern nationalism and the promotion of a
“national community,” no matter how humane or humanistic the propaganda behind either.
“It is, I repeat, the serious business of any conservative group to recognize ‘national
community’ for what it is and to oppose it at every turn.”

The job of every conservative, then, is twofold. First, he must fight “tirelessly” against the
“centralized, omnicompetent, and unitary state” and all that goes with it: debt as well as
empire. Second, he must do everything possible to promote that which makes the free
society not just an ordered one, but a good one: the intermediary institutions of family,
church, friendship, business, and school.

To these words, my soul doth rejoice.

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